Technological developments offer convenience and efficiency to variety of aspects of our lives. One of such technological development is automated phone systems, offering banking services, customer care services, etc. Some of the elaborate automated systems are capable of processing human voice, thus enhancing features of the automated phone systems by allowing users' responses not only to involve digits and short words capable of being entered using a phone key pad, but also to include complex phrases.
Users of the automated phone systems supporting voice recognition may understand what the system is expecting from them prior to the system finishing playing a prompt. Because time is valuable in our society many users, upon understanding the meaning of the prompt, will speak their choice without waiting for the end of the prompt. Thus, in order to better serve users, the elaborate automated phone systems are capable of processing voice responses made prior to the end of the prompt playing. This situation is known as “barge-in.” In order to acknowledge the user's response, the current automated phone systems terminate the prompt immediately upon detecting the barge-in.
Due to the fact that the automated phone systems are not capable of distinguishing one human voice from the other or immediately determining the meaning of the speech, the system will terminate the current prompt upon detection of any speech or noise, which may be a statement made by a person located in the same room with the user. In addition, the user of the automated phone system may be conducting a conversation with another person while listening to the prompt, causing the automated phone system to detect the statement made by the user and terminate the prompt even though the statement was not directed to the automated phone system.
Termination of the prompt upon detection of any speech or noise may present certain problems. If the termination of the prompt occurs prior to the user understanding the meaning of the prompt, then the user will not be able to know what the system expects from him. In addition, the system will fail to interpret or will erroneously interpret the detected speech or noise, because the speech or noise was not directed to the automated phone system. This may cause the user to lose patience and hang up the phone, or experience delays while waiting for the system to recover, if the system has an ability to recover from such an error.
What is needed, therefore, is a solution which overcomes these and other shortcomings of the prior art.